Originally posted on 4/6/2012
Hello, my name is Sonia, and I’ve written fan fiction on the internet.
Oh, yeah, I said it.
Have you all heard of Fifty Shades of Gray? I bet you have. It’s been quite the topic of water cooler conversation lately, according to magazines like Entertainment Weekly, who last week featured a salacious cover of a naked, faceless woman with the headline Fifty Shades of Gray EXPOSED! Always subtle, that Entertainment Weekly. About as subtle as this book sounds like it is.
If you don’t know what Fifty Shades of Gray is, I’ll enlighten you. It’s a novel that began as a piece of Twilight fan fiction and became a best-selling phenomenon. It’s a romance, I guess, about a mysterious man and a woman who falls for him. As far as I can tell, without having read any of it, it’s mostly about sex. They have a lot of kinky sex, tie-me-up and hit me sort of sex? And people like to read it, especially – according to the media – women.
Do you ever have what I like to call a hipster moment? Like, when you realize you’ve known about something forever and the rest of the world has just discovered it? This is how I felt reading Entertainment Weekly’s article about Fifty Shades of Gray. There seems to be a lot of tittering and blushing going on in the media about this book, with the undercurrent of oh my, women like to read about kinky sex? What is this madness? I know, right? It’s insanity. The next thing you know women will be enjoying sex too, and then what will we do? THE WORLD WILL END.
The slightly quieter but ever-present element of this debate is also: Fan fiction! What is this fan fiction?! As if author E L James was the first person on earth to think: Hey, I like that story and those characters, I think I’ll write one of my own where things go a little differently! In this case I guess the Bella and Edward-inspired characters have more sex of the BDSM variety, though from my impressions of the actual Twilight saga, that’s not that far off from what those of us in fandom call “canon,” or the original source material.
Yes, I am a member of fandom. I am counting myself among the hundreds of thousands of us who have either read or written fan fiction. If you’d like a more detailed breakdown of the extent of fandom and fan fiction, please read this remarkably well-balanced article by best-selling author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) in Time Magazine. Yes, Time Magazine ran an article awhile ago on fan fiction! So ground-breaking, this stuff is. You’d think Shakespeare hadn’t been writing fan fiction five hundred years ago when he borrowed his plots and characters from all over creation and became what is debatedly the most famous writer in all of Western literary canon.
But hey, let’s stop talking generalities and get personal. I’ve written fan fiction since I was roughly 16 years old. I’ve been posting it online since I was 19. At last count, I’d written in 12 fandoms. I’ve written a lot of fan fiction, okay? No, I am not proud of all of it. No, I will not link you to it. But I have a lot of love for fan fiction and fandom, and I’m so tired of people acting like it’s some sort of scandalous land where crazy people share their twisted fantasies. Yes, it is that for some people, but you know what? The world is that for some people. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, assholes.
I can tell you this: like E L James, I might have never written a novel if I hadn’t written fan fiction first. More than my expensive writing degree (sorry, academia!), fan fiction has taught me how to craft a good hook, how to develop voice, how to move a story along. When I was 16, using the characters of others gave me a jumping off point, a way to find my own voice, an audience, a community and a wide open space to try out new things stylistically and plot-wise.
I’ve heard critics scoff at fan fiction sometimes for being “easy,” a crutch, as if imitating the voices of others is somehow simpler than creating your own. I’m not sure this is true. Yes, writing fan fiction gives you somewhere to start, but it doesn’t determine where you go, and in a world where thousands of people are writing about the same characters you are? You better work damn hard to distinguish yourself. And in case you think fan fiction only exists in chat rooms or message boards (oh my God, is this 1999?), how about that book Wide Sargasso Sea, where Jean Rhys wrote a sort-of prequel to Jane Eyre? Or March by Geraldine Brooks, the story of Little Women told from the viewpoint of Mr. March? Those books won major awards. Please don’t assume that because something is fan fiction, it’s also trash.
There’s a lot of bad fan fiction out there, it’s true. Sadly, there’s a lot of bad writing in the world in general. I don’t know if Fifty Shades of Gray is good or bad, because I haven’t read it, and I wouldn’t venture to judge it until I have. (I probably won’t read it. I don’t think it’s my cup of tea.) Every time I see somebody make some crack about it being Twilight-inspired, though, I want to smack them in the face, and lord knows I am no Twihard. In fact, I hate that entire franchise and what it teaches teenage girls, but that’s a subject for another rant. My point is this: please stop treating fan fiction writers, and fans in general, like they are animals at the zoo. We are all around you. We are your friends, we are your co-workers, we are your family, we are (possibly) your children.
I get it, you’re too cool to like things. You never get super-passionate about stuff like, say, sports, right? Never watch a game or a show or read a book and wish it’d gone another way? Never got to the end of some movie you loved and wished there was more of it?
Congratulations! You’re no tweaked out fan, no Trekkie, no Twihard. I’m sure you’ve never read or seen or encountered anything in your life inspired by anything else.
Do you know what the only difference is between a person who wishes there was more of some piece of entertainment they loved and a person who writes fan fiction? The fan fiction writer actually did something about it. So, yeah, I write fan fiction. You might call it crazy. I call it pro-active.